Last year on The Majority United was honored to have a representative from Hardy Girls on TMU Radio to discuss their work on stopping the sexualization of girls. I am proud and please to bring you the following update about what they have achieved.

Author : All Made Up: A Girl’s Guide to Seeing Through Celebrity Hype and Celebrating Real Beauty who left Seventeen to make a difference – serving on boards dedicated to fostering critical analysis of media messages, and consulted with national organizations such as Girls Inc. on their programming and policies for girls.

We are all exciting to read the following and look forward to continuing progress I the future. Please reach out to Seventeen and let them know that you approve of the change and by all means support hardy Girls and the wonderful work they do.

May e-news, we talked about the SPARKTeam’s activism, and Julia Bluhm’s Change.org petition, asking Seventeen magazine to commit to just one photoshop-free spread per month to celebrate real girls. As a founding partner of SPARK, we are excited about how the SPARKTeam is taking action to end the sexualization of girls and women in the media. While staging a mock photo shoot in front of Seventeen’s New York City headquarters, Julia was invited to speak directly to Seventeen‘s Editor-in-Chief Ann Shoket about her concerns. Julia hadn’t heard back from Seventeen, so she was left to think that while they had listened to her and the almost 86,000 people who signed her petition, they weren’t going to make any changes.

However, that assumption was proven wrong when the August issue of Seventeen magazine arrived on her doorstep. In her Editor’s letter, Ann Shoket discussed their “Body Peace Treaty” where they pledged to “always feature real girls and models who are healthy” and to “be totally up-front about what goes into our photo shoots.” We believe that the activism of Julia, Izzy Labbe, and the entire SPARK team has brought the issue of the negative effects of the hyper-sexualization of girls and women to the public’s attention.

Read more on our blog, including a link to the story about SPARK that was on the front page of the Boston Globe on July 11, 2012.